News about climate change are all around and hopefully, nobody still believes that climate change is not happening. Governments all over the world sign contracts and try to regulate the pollutant emissions of their industrial companies. Even if there is a slight change in thinking, our actions are not enough. We will have to face the fact, that the appearance of our world will change. But what changes are to be expected? Is there a regional difference?

A geography professor of the University of Cincinnati tries to answer our questions with an interactive map, by the use of a macroclimate prediction model and metrological data of 50,000 international weather stations. ClimateEx allows identifying regions, which are confronted with larger or smaller effects of climate change. The map gives quite detailed information about regional similarities in climate and shows the environmental change in time. Looking at the changes between -6000 BC up to today and comparing this with the period of today to 2070, the prediction is shocking. The authors Stepinski and Netzel wrote in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society: “The climate is always changing…But it usually changes on a geological timescale. It’s not surprising that the climate today is different from the climate a half-million years ago. But now we’re experiencing changes on a scale of 100 years. That’s a completely different thing.”

The ClimateEx is not only an informative tool, which can be useful for long-term planning of urbanized space or helps identifying most likely occurrences of extreme weather phenomena, but also an educational tool to disseminating knowledge about the effects of climate change.